Nobody would publish Visions of Cody except a hundred-page excerpt, which was put out by James Laughlin at New Directions as a limited edition [in 1959]. The book was not published for twenty years, though it should have been published in sequence after On the Road, to show Kerouac’s natural development. That would have blown people’s minds because it would have shown the depth of his art and the controversial complicated nature of it. Maybe all the critics would have been shocked like I was for a year. Instead his publishers asked him to write a nice easy book for people, to explain who all these characters were, and what his ideas were about the Beat Generation. So he sat down and wrote The Dharma Bums in simple, short sentence style as a commercial offering. He’d already accomplished this huge work of experimental prose, so it was time for him to write something short and sweet and simple. In the opening of Vanity of Duluoz, he says,
All right, Wifey, maybe I’m a big pain in the you-know-what but after I’ve given you a recitation of the troubles I had to go through to make good in America between 1935 and more or less now, 1967, and although I also know everybody in the world’s had his own troubles, you’ll understand that my particular form of anguish came from being too sensitive to all the lunkheads I had to deal with just so I could get to be a high school football star, a college student pouring coffee and washing dishes and scrimmaging till dark and reading Homer’s Iliad in three days all at the same time, and God help me, a W R I T E R whose very “success,” far from being a happy triumph as of old, was the sign of doom Himself. (Insofar as nobody loves my dashes anyway, I’ll use regular punctuation for the new illiterate generation.)69
That’s his first paragraph, he’s pissed off. It was easy for him because he’d written so much anyway, it doesn’t make any difference to him. Behind most of Kerouac’s later work is the legend of the forties, which he did not even get to write on account of the hypersensitivity of Lucien Carr. At Lucien’s insistence, Kerouac never wrote about him until many years later. Here’s his first notion of Burroughs.
The fascination of Hubbard at first was based on the fact that he was a key member of this here new “New Orleans School” and thus this was nothing more than this handful of rich sharp spirits from that town led by Claude, their falling star Lucifer angel boy demon genius, and Franz the champeen cynical hero, and Will as observer weighted with more irony than the lot of em, and others like Will’s caustic harming buddy Kyles Elgins who with him at Harvard had “collaborated on an ode” to ’orror which showed the Titanic sinking and the ship’s captain (Franz) shooting a woman in a kimono to put on her said kimono and get on a life boat with the women and children and when heroic spray-ey men shout “Madame will you take this fourteen-year-old boy on your lap?” (Claude) Captain Franz smirks “Why of course” and meanwhile Kyles’ paranoid uncle who lisps is hacking away at the gunwales with a Peruvian machete as reaching hands rise from the waters “Ya buntha bathadts!” and a Negro orchestra is playing the Star-Spangled Banner on the sinking ship . . . a story they wrote together at Harvard, which, when I first saw it, gave me to realize that this here New Orleans clique was the most evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America but had to admire in my admiring youth. Their style was dry, new to me, mine had been the misty-nebulous New England Idealist style tho (as I say) my saving grace in their eyes (Will’s, Claude’s especially) was the materialistic Canuck taciturn cold skepticism all the picked-up Idealism in the world of books couldnt hide . . . “Duluoz is a shit posing as an angel.”70
Actually it’s a view of himself. Cynical, cold, and underneath it all observant, rather than the mask of the misty-nebulous New England idealist style. Further visions of Burroughs, 1945 or 1946.
“Well why don’t you wear a merchant seaman uniform man like you said you wore in London for your visit there, and get a lot of soft entry into things, it’s wartime, isn’t it, and here you go around in T-shirt and chino pints, or paints, or pants, and nobody knows you’re a serviceman proud, should we say?” and I answered: “’Tsa finkish thing to do” which he remembered and apparently took to be a great proud statement coming straight from the saloon’s mouth, as he, a timid (at the time) middleclass kid with rich parents had always yearned to get away from his family’s dull “suburban” life (in Chicago) into the real rich America of saloons and George Raft and Runyon characters, virile, sad, factual America of his dreams, tho he took my statement as an opportunity to say, in reply:
“It’s a finkish world.”
Harbinger of the day when we’d become fast friends and he’d hand me the full two-volume edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West and say “EEE di fy your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of Fact.” When he would become my great teacher in the night. But in those early days, and at this about our third meeting, hearing me say, “’Tsa finkish thing to do” (which for me was just an ordinary statement at the time based on the way seamen and my wife and I looked proudly and defiantly on the world of un-like-us “finks,” a disgusting thing in itself granted, but that’s what it was), hearing me say that, Will apparently marveled secretly, whether he remembers it now or not, and with timid and tender curiosity on top of that, his pale eyes behind the spectacles looking mildly startled. I think it was about then he rather vaguely began to admire me, either for virile independent thinking, or “rough trade” (whatever they think), or charm, or maybe broody melancholy philosophic Celtic unexpected depth, or simple ragged shiny frankness, or hank of hair, or reluctance in the revelation of interesting despair, but he remembered it well (we discussed it years later in Africa) and it was years later that I marveled over that, wishing we would turn time back and I could amaze him again with such unconscious simplicity, as our forefathers gradually unfolded and he began to realize I was really one, one, of Briton blood, and especially, after all, one kind of a funny imbecilic saint. With what maternal care he brooded over my way of saying it, looking away, down, frowning, “’Tsa finkish thing to do,” in that now (to me) “New Orleans way of Claude’s,” snively, learned, pronouncing the consonants with force and the vowels with that slight “eu” or “eow” also you hear spoken in that curious dialect they speak in Washington D.C. (I am trying to describe completely indescribable materials) but you say “deu” or “deuo” and you say “f” as tho it was being spat from your lazy lips. So Will sits by me on the bench in that irrecoverable night with mild amazement going “hm hm hm” and “It’s a finkish world” and he’s instructing me seriously, looking with blank and blink interested eyes for the first time into mine. And only because he knew little about me then, amazed, as “familiarity breeds contempt” and bread on the waters there’s a lotta fish after it.
Where is he tonight? Where am I? Where are you?71
That’s a nice little piece of meditation. I think he gets hung up on Burroughs’s character, the next chapter begins, “O Will Hubbard in the night!”
O Will Hubbard in the night! A great writer today he is, he is a shadow hovering over western literature, and no great writer ever lived without that soft and tender curiosity, verging on maternal care, about what others think and say, no great writer ever packed off from this scene on earth without amazement like the amazement he felt because I was myself.
Tall strange “Old Bull” in his gray seersucker suit sitting around with us on a hot summernight in old lost New York of 1944, the grit in the sidewalk shining the same sad way in ’tween lights as I would see it years later when I would travel across oceans to see him just and just that same sad hopeless grit and my mouth like grit and myself trying to explain it to him: “Will, why get excited about anything, the grit is the same everywhere?”
“The grit is the same everywhere? What on EARTH are you talkin about, Jack, really you’re awfully funny, hm h mf hmf?” holding his belly to laugh. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”
“I mean I saw the grit where we sat years ago, to me it’s a symbol of your life.”
“My
LIFE? My dear fellow my life is perfectly free of grit, dearie. Let us relegate this subject to the I-Dont-Wanta-Hear-About-It Department. And order another drink . . . Really.”
“It blows in dreary winds outside the bars where you believe and believingly bend your head with the gray light to explain something to someone . . . it blows in the endless dusts of atomic space.”
“My G A W D, I’m not going to buy you another drink if you get L I T E R A R Y!”
XIV
At this time I’m writing about he was a bartender down on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, yet.) (Okay). How my head used to marvel in those days, tug at my heartstrings, break almost . . .72
That’s amazing, someone talking about himself like that, recollecting years before. I suppose that’s universal. It’s Kerouac’s vision of Burroughs, by hindsight. Now, his vision of me is by hindsight pretty interesting.
I was sitting in Johnnie’s apartment one day when the door opened and in walks this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, seventeen years old, burning black eyes, a strangely deep mature voice, looks at me, says “Discretion is the better part of valor.”
“Aw where’s my food!” I yelled at Johnnie, because that’s precisely all I had on my mind at the moment he walked in. Turns out it took years for Irwin to get over a certain fear of the “brooding football artist yelling for his supper in big daddy chair” or some such. I didn’t like him anyway. One look at him, a few days of knowing him to avouch my private claim, and I came to the conclusion he was a lecher who wanted everybody in the world to take a bath in the same huge bathtub which would give him a chance to feel legs under the dirty water. This is precisely the image I had of him on first meeting. Johnnie also felt he was repugnant in this sense. Claude liked him, always has, and was amused, entertained, they wrote poems together, manifestoes of the “New Vision,” rushed around with books, had bull sessions in Claude’s Dalton Hall room where he hardly ever slept, took Johnnie and Cecily out to ballets and stuff downtown when I was out in Long Island visiting my folks.73
That’s his first version of me and his view of Lucien Carr again. Claude (Carr) in this novel has an older friend [Franz Mueller (Kammerer)], a friend of Hubbard (Burroughs), who has been following him around, trying to make him for a decade, since he was a kid.
Wherever Claude went, Mueller followed. Claude’s mother even tried to have the man arrested. At the time, Hubbard, Franz’ closest friend, remonstrated again and again with him to go off someplace and find another boy more amenable, go to sea, go to South America, live in the jungle, go marry Cindy Lou in Virginia (Mueller came from aristocrats somewhere). No. It was the romantic and fatal attachment: I could understand it myself because for the first time in my life I found myself stopping in the street and thinking: “Wonder where Claude is now? What’s he doing right now?” and going off to find him. I mean, like that feeling you get during a love affair. It was a very nostalgic Season in Hell. There was the nostalgia of Johnnie and me in love, Claude and Cecily in love, Franz in love with Claude, Hubbard hovering like a shadow, Garden in love with Claude and Hubbard and me and Cecily and Johnnie and Franz, the war, the second front (which occurred just before this time), the poetry, the soft city evenings, the cries of Rimbaud!, “New Vision!,” the great Götterdämmerung, the love song “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” the smell of beers and smoke in the West End Bar, the evenings we spent on the grass by the Hudson River on Riverside Drive at 116th Street watching the rose west, watching the freighters slide by.74
That’s Kerouac’s nostalgia for that time and it’s the heart of a lot of his writing. It occurred to me early that the people he wrote beautifully about were Burroughs [and] Herbert Huncke. In On the Road he wrote really well about Burroughs and Cassady at great length. Later on Gary Snyder, full-length portraits. I remember at the time thinking that his books were like paintings where the central character of the portrait got complete treatment, full flesh and blood, lots of subtlety and color in cheek and eyelid and the subsidiary characters were just sketched in very negligently around them, including myself or Philip Whalen or Kenneth Rexroth. We’re almost cartoon sketches, sometimes very unflattering, but his heart went out to certain people that he wrote heroically about.
If you read Cassady’s letters, you’ll see just how much Cassady admired and loved Kerouac. I was in love with him and saw him as the heroic Faustian writer. The guy who could sit home and pore [over] hundreds of pages full of idyllic sentences in solitude egolessly. I felt like some little squiggly shit writing out a little lyric. And Neal, since he worshipped poetry, was always amazed at Jack’s total solidity and extensiveness, his real power of concentration and creation. The only reason anybody was beautiful was because they had seen it through his eyes and expressed it poetically.
Everybody got their own idea of their own beauty out of him. I got my idea that I was beautiful out of his tolerance and acceptance. When you hear yourself echoed in somebody else’s indulgent, tender, sympathetic consciousness, you begin to appreciate yourself. We saw him as hero and it was a surprise later to find critics speaking of Kerouac as a weakling that was always following other people around.
You’ve got to realize that he is the conceiver. I was very much aware of that and the reader should be aware of that. All this wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Kerouac. We would be just a bunch of amphetamine-head, faggot, jailbird professors. That kind of phrasing comes from his mind. Kerouac was the energy source.
Burroughs was a source of enormous information and intelligence, also impersonality and cool and balance and good judgment and good sense and good manner and culture and aristocracy and faggotry, not faggotry so much as the high culture of homosexuality. Kerouac had that shining honesty, the simple ragged shiny frankness.
That’s one thing that Burroughs didn’t have, simple ragged shiny frankness. He had a kind of little boy, Gainsborough Blue Boy delicacy and melancholy and fragility and vulnerability. He was very vulnerable and sweet and sad, like a little boy. He was unexpectedly sensitive, but Kerouac was more of the outgoing football hero with a golden heart. This is all exaggeration obviously, but I think the energy, the enthusiasm came from Kerouac, even the enthusiasm for writing. Burroughs ascribes Kerouac’s enthusiasm and encouragement as the greatest single force in making him write, finally.
Burroughs’s permissiveness was in exploring the sinister otherworld outside of America. Kerouac was great at America, but as soon as he got across the border, it became an evil other world. Europeans, European fairies, hiding and waiting. Burroughs explored drugs, explored Times Square, and that [is what] intrigued me and Jack, Burroughs’s exploration of evil, dark things.
Kerouac and I were both idealistic, looking for a new vision. “High on the peak top bats down in the valley of the lamb” is a little ditty Kerouac wrote. Burroughs was high on the peak top with the bats and he wanted to be down in the valley with the lamb. We saw Burroughs as a sinister agent of facts, but he saw himself not as sinister but as an exterminator. He had studied medicine, so he was more impersonal, more cold-blooded, reptilian. As Robert Bly says of Burroughs, “reptilian consciousness.” We reported that back to Burroughs and Burroughs said, “What’s he got against reptiles?” Kerouac and I saw Burroughs as very shy, tender, and sweet, with good manners. Quiet with a sense of humor cutting through.
Kerouac was more writer than person. His subject was always America and the promise of America. America as a poem. When America failed to be that idealistic poem of Thomas Wolfe, Jack found it more difficult to lyricize or make rhapsody about America. It probably took him a long time to say, “I better write a minor book to my wifey, instead of a major Beethovean trilogy about the triumph of soul in America.” That must have been hard, but he did it. He was already disillusioned by looking at things through the coffin. He’d already seen through his own vanity, his own egocentric nature and the desire fo
r self-aggrandizement.
CHAPTER 15
Kerouac, Cassady, and Visions of Cody, Part 2
In Visions of Cody, Kerouac and Cassady were both exploring their first impressions of the universe. I think that was the basis of the rapport they had. What was their earliest vision of the nature of the cosmos as it appeared to the mind of a child or adolescent?
. . . nobody made a move to notice or even gave much of a crap and Cody would have immediately felt drowned again, except suddenly for the saving memory of a hunch he used to have in boyhood which was whenever he turned his back on the people who were involved with him and even others who happened to be standing nearby, perfect strangers sometimes, they immediately gathered with the speed of light at the nape of his neck to discuss him voicelessly, dancing, pointing, until, jerking his head around for a quick look or just slowly to check, it turned out they’d always twanged back in place with all-to-be-expected fiendish perfect hypocrisy and in exactly the same bland position as before.75
There’s another vision of driving along and Cody telling Kerouac that his childhood fantasy [had been of] having a knife miles long that came out of the edge of the car. As the car went along it would cut down all the trees and houses and people. Kerouac had a facility for zeroing in on archetypal takes on people and situations. That comes from an aesthetic appreciation of the grandeur and silliness and curious eccentric individuality that kids have in adolescence.
Best Minds of My Generation Page 12